The swifts stay high and the sparrows still chatter by my seaside home.

Yet this week The Naked Punk wants a riot of her own. Not in the sense of fun and riotous pleasure, but in the sense of approaching the level of firebombing. On each little Molotov cocktail there will be the word FRUSTRATION. What has set off my rarely seen streak of aggro?

The fact that today, again, in 2018, the 21st century, I was forced to use a stinky back entrance to access services.

This was after being told at the front of the building that not only was the platform lift broken, but pointy man gesticulated and exclaimed “that thing” (i.e. my wheelchair) couldn’t go on the lift anyway. Naturally this was said over my head, aimed in the general direction of my PA. Add to this the journey to the rear entrance was bumpy and unpleasant, smelly overflowing commercial sized bins crammed up along the path hindering access further.

This all screams SPECIAL NEEDS. It all screams medical model. It all screams inequality.

That’s my experience earlier of an environmental barrier, which quite frankly in this day and age should not exist.

Meanwhile, just a little reminder that I work for a living as a writer. I know I’ve worked hard and I’m proud of my achievements. But still I am patronised, still I am shoved into categories I don’t like and I don’t choose.

Every day as a creative I face vast inequality and it is overwhelmingly rooted in prejudiced and hypocritical attitudes.

I love and thank those that have had faith in me and my work, who have seen beyond the stereotyping, who understand I am a storyteller with a lot to say.

Yet love and understanding on its own may not remove a barrier and I am tired, as I fly fast through my 50s, of this very long battle that is never ending. But we can never allow ourselves, those of use defined as the Other, to slip back and accept our status as second class citizens, those who must “accept reality”, “be pragmatic”, accept our labels as “common sense”.

The next time a venue tells me it has no accessible space for me to perform in, I will not be indulgent.

And the next magazine to claim no one is interested in these stories I tell will be shamed with full throttle Pepper retaliation.

But hey, you know I’m a pussy cat really – although even we will show our claws when me must. You have been warned. Miaow.

Punk is my raw beginning. It saw my writing find a raging home in early fanzines. It fired a freedom in me to start accepting myself, that I was OK as a human being, as a woman, as a creative, who could challenge the categories imposed upon me. It is the energy that triggered my activism, and my passion for social justice and equality.

I’m Naked because I strive to be open in my writing, to show what needs to be shown.

Stories that strip away stereotype and expectation, stories that you’ve not heard before, because we’ve been barred from that privileged club for so long.

My stories subvert and maybe challenge, in the same way I provoke when I’ve posed naked – literally – for artists and photographers, and when I’ve performed burlesque. To draw an audience into a nakedness, to share the fun and the message: accept yourself, accept a new story.

Sometimes it’s good to know when I’m too naked. When the challenges we all face conspire to make us vulnerable and forgetful of protecting ourselves. I don’t want to be in this space. No one should, and we can find compassion for ourselves and each other to not let this happen. Naked is always a choice.

As The Naked Punk, I’ll always be on this bumpy journey.

I don’t have answers and it’s not easy – but through my work I’ll enjoy sharing punky naked questions along the way.

29 December 2017

Counting the hours till 2018. Not wishing time on exactly, but restless now for new beginnings even if the battles are old.

Lots happened this last year. My book First in the World Somewhere was published by Unbound/Penguin and it’s out there in the bookshops. I’ll be visiting many in 2018. It was a privilege to launch it at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre in London – with super lovely comedian and writer Francesca Martinez as compère for the event.

I secured a contract with Burning Eye Books and my first ever poetry collection, Come Home Alive, will come out in 2018

Good things, achievements I’m delighted with and thankful for.

Beautiful and enjoyable times with dear friends. I love my friends. Treasures everyone. Thank you all so much.

But. Of course there’s a but.

I was ill a fair bit. Got better. Got ill again. And so on. The main reason for no blog, including increased work commitments.

And another BUT is from the continuing and devastating attacks on disabled people. Including myself. Social care threatened. Benefits threatened. Demonisation of anyone not within the monied elite. Condemned for being poor. Believe me, this is the worst of Victorian thinking. It’s your fault for being born in the wrong family. It’s your fault for acquiring an impairment, it’s your fault for getting old…

We have to decide what we want. What sort of world. How we relate to each other within the human family. Look outside this monstrous over-fed capitalism and its control of the media. See that we are kind and open to talk and share when we can look beyond their attempts to brainwash us.

I don’t care. We’re creatures entwined with the rhythms of the natural world, if we allow ourselves to remember that. The sunlight is a blessing. So there!

I’m picking through my journals for the writing of my memoir First in the World Somewhere, which starts in earnest very soon. And you can pre-buy it through that link. Please!

Begun in 1979, what do I see in these journals? I’m a teenager, naive, assuming hilarious worldliness, yet layered with anxieties from years in institutional settings. I’m afraid that World War Three is starting. The USSR invaded Afghanistan on December 24th 1979. In a physio rehab hospital, I talked with friends in scared tones of nuclear threat and where we want to be when The End comes. The staff tell us off, insist we’re being silly little girls. I reckon they were scared too, the prats.

This experience and hatred of nuclear weapons stayed with me. Thatcher might have been elected in May that year – I joined CND, I donated to the Greenham Common Women. I wrote an anti-nuclear song called Four Tonnes – about the amount of nuclear weaponry per capita. And I support Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on Trident now. MAD is…mad.

Of course, the journals also contain embarrassing comical outbursts of my teeny yearnings. I wrote a novel that year The Isis Promise (now lost) believing I would be an international literary star immediately. Haha, still yearning for that one!

And I ached to bonk Lewis Collins from the Professionals, Marc Bolan and a cute porter who worked at the hospital – a committed socialist. I think he fancied me, but I was too much the shy punky little crip, too damaged to believe it possible.

I’m distancing from my personal Facebook page. It’s ragging my nerves, which are quite ragged at the best of times. People get nasty too fast. I’m not engaging. Much better to prattle on here and make brief Penny pronouncements for those interested.

I’ve got a broken shoulder. In fact, I’ve had a broke shoulder for some months which severely limits my typing. Don’t mention voice dictation software. I use it, when I have enough mental stamina to manage it. It has no soul and does not compute creative subtlety. Give it a poetic word and it goes into a brainless meltdown and makes a word like ‘penniless’ into, yes, penis. Therefore it’s taken me a long, long time to write this blog.

Meanwhile, I was at the House of Lords last night, doing my bit as a “disability sexual activist”, which is an interesting label to add to my CV. It was a good event, though I am weary. Crip sex is still a taboo and there’s still a lot of About Us Without Us. It is improving, that’s a hopeful thing.

Visiting the House of Lords is always a weird experience for a poor little working class bumpkin like me. It smells. Age, polish. Wealth? The building is extraordinary, I can’t deny that. It caresses my writer’s dizzy brain, and as a friend once said, it’s like Hogwarts. I did get to meet – briefly – Black Rod, due to the inevitable confusion with parking. Not every one can say that, and perhaps they wouldn’t want to.

I’m chugging on with the crowd-funding efforts for my memoir First in the World Somewhere. I’m glad the publisher Unbound are looking after me. They are real people. I feel they care about their writers, and they wanted the memoir. It’s hard at times to be telling the world this is a great thing and please, pledge. But it’s not a begging bowl-it’s a transaction. And outside of my personal story, I know this tale has not been told in this way. My disability weaves within the pages, implicitly social model, as I fight – shyly at first – to follow my dreams as a writer, singer-song writer and bohemian. Discovering sex, writing about sex, enjoying sex – connecting with like-mind crips in arts and activism, is also in there. Join me if you believe this book should be out there, pledge if you can. Robert Wyatt, dear man, has done so and is happy to me to shout his endorsement from the treetops.

My cat Bessie aged 17, gets noisy at night these days. Apparently it’s akin to the confusion of an elderly person. She miaows in a long pathetic fashion, often in the echo chamber of the bathroom. Advice is to not respond as it reinforces the behaviour. That’s tough, even though I know she’s well, fresh from a mani-pedi and gaining weight. I want to reassure her and gather her to my bosom, so we can sleep peacefully together.

And on that note I realise I am tired. There was the awfulness of the Syrian air strikes to talk about; the utterly tiresome squabbles of politics and the biased media. But I can add little to that right now, and need to retreat to the stuff in front of my noise.

Be happy for the holidays. Be pragmatic. Remember, the light returns after December 21st. You can always rely on natural phenomena to give you a reasonable constant. Sort of.

I didn’t sleep till 3am. About. Why is it, I can fall asleep in the car in startling sunlight, but squirm in my too-hot bed in a wretched state past the witching hour? Counting cats, fussing my cat, doing a crossword, sitting up, laying down. Staring at my eyelids. Any ideas, my friends how to slay the Insomnimonster?

I did think, hey, I’ll start doing some little blogs. Stop all this fretting for the Big Idea. This is the big idea.

I’m in a state of flux. Oh lots going on, such as working for the marvellous Mslexia people with a blog, and around the near corner there is more. Meanwhile…

Look, I’m not apologising. I hate a government that pushes profit above people and makes poverty a crime. I’ve read history, I know the Victorians.

We’re reliving that era now. Is anyone looking into the even darker recesses of Tory plans? Have any property barrens done deals with them Bullingdon Boys to build (cheap crap) places where the very poor can be parked yet? A working rehabilitation centre? Ahem. A Big Society All In It Together Work Hub? Drop-in Back To Work “Counsellors” on hand, all trained online by a Maximarse type programme, naturally, to incentivise you away from being damnable lazy plebs.

As for us Cripples of all types, I can see it now. Vast rebranded warehouses with us all in little truckle beds, cheap po-pots underneath, emptied by those press-ganged from the Job Employment Reassignment Korp…

The BBC, at Broadcasting House, is a strange old beast. Somehow reassuringly familiar and ragged at the edges, despite the shiny high tech news centre that beats at the heart of the renovated building.

I’m back for Newsnight, for a discussion on the government’s record on welfare. Down, down in the bowels for the studio, it strikes me as a carpeted nuclear bunker. Corridors, so many corridors, annexes, and turnings. Once in the Green Room, I’m given coffee and go into make up. As usual the BBC staff are polite and helpful, always eager to please.

I’ve done a touch of research – such as scanning through the main parties’ manifestos for new welfare policies and looking up official benefit fraud figures, which incidentally are negligible. Looking through these papers calms me, because while I rarely get nervous in the obvious sense (been around too long!), I am consumed with an anxiety to do my best and make this count. I know there will be a programme agenda – we will be gently coaxed and kept in order – so it’s important to be ready for all opportunities to make a point.

As other guests arrive, I’m struck, as I often am, with a sense of otherness, the Me and Them. Only someone who has experienced exclusion would understand this fully. Everyone was polite. ‘White’ Dee, who shot to fame via Benefits Street, and Lucy Hardwick, from the Accrington Food Bank, were the most approachable. Fraser Nelson, from The Spectator, bore a passing resemblance to Nick Clegg, which was scary in itself. But Nelson did not make eye contact. We waited in an intermittent silence punctuated by small chat, ready to be lead into the studio space. Rumours abound through my Twitter feed that the Tories were scared off, so Mark Harper, Minister for Disabled People, pulled out. Is the Pepper really so fearsome?

I’m reasonably happy with how I did. Pleased I managed to cover some key attacks that the coalition government has landed on us: the closure of ILF; the caps on Access To Work; the sanctions hitting people with learning disabilities and mental health issues, and the demonising of disabled people. Yet there’s always room for more, especially with the election only two weeks away.

Emily Maitlis was charming and skilful; at one point she asked me has the government helped disabled people in anyway? What could I say but ‘Absolutely not.’ I never hide my socialist leanings but, honestly, show me anything remotely of worth that has been done by this government that actually supports and understands the challenges disabled people face.

The experience heightened my belief that there remains a huge gulf between politicians, certain sectors of society (mostly the rich sectors) and disabled people. Maybe the gulf has always been there, but it is at the heart of the discrimination we face now. We are still defined as separate. We are not part of society, in the sense of living within and belonging to communities, families and networks. At least, that’s the perception I come up against throughout my work. We know the opposite is true. We know there have always been disabled people and there always will be. Us today, you tomorrow; that’s how it goes for humanity.

Any other view is frankly a lie and unsupportable. Our definition as ‘other’ and our absence from mainstream consciousness is caused by the barriers and attitudes that we tirelessly fight. I don’t want to reinforce the Them and Us schtick, but I do believe it is ingrained, meaning disabled people have the add burden of these unhelpful, unwanted preconceptions.We make Them uncomfortable and they don’t like it.

I don’t know how we change this, other than chipping away, chipping and chipping as always, which is what I’ve tried to do for 30 years – as have many of us.

At the very least, I suppose it’s a good thing that they have Us on a programme like BBC Newsnight. And so to end I would like to dedicate the poem below to that august programme in thanks for inviting me on-till next time

Thus freshly Oscar-ed Eddie Redmayne enters into the unhallowed annals of cripple impersonators – there should be a special award for this perhaps? A Spazzer? Spozcer? I’d suggest A Stephen but Hawking probably wouldn’t get the irony and it would no doubt be hijacked into something worthy.

So this year’s Stephen goes to… Eddie! In this perfect mimicry, Eddie drags his feet, curls his hands, twists his mouth a la Hawking for all he’s worth – the media is full of interviews about how he studied patients and even had speech therapy for this gold-star imitation. Oh my.

So, before judging any other aspect of this film I have to get this massive exercise in cripping-up out of the way. It sticks in the craw. I know the arguments against using a disabled actor and, you know, it’s not good enough and it is frankly shit.

It is not about urging casting directors into an equally disturbing ‘copy’ an impairment system. It’s to do with allowing disabled actors to bring their experience of what it is like to be disabled to a role about a disabled person. For fucks sake, let’s try harder, at least.

But I liked it – a bit, and more than I was expecting. And I like Eddie and think he’s an exceptional actor – he doesn’t need to cripple-mimic to show that.

I was slack in not realising the film is based on the book Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking, Stephen’s first wife, and this lapse meant I found the initial perspective confusing.

Presumably the screenplay fleshed out Hawking’s own pre-Jane story and the early scenes are platitudes of happy young Oxbridge boffins on bikes. Then we have the Sad Music Moments of Stephen in hospital corridors at his diagnosis; I almost expected the film to go into Black and White Land, and a droll voice to start asking for money, and a text number to donate now to save this suffering species…of physicist.

Non-disabled film-makers plainly can’t help regurgitate the idea of impairment as fearful tragedy and only tragedy. An individual might see it like that; other individuals do not, and as yet we have no balanced representations to show the experience of an acquired impairment in any other way than this. Hawking clearly hasn’t lived his life in a tragedy mode; it wasn’t the end of everything for him. I yearned for alternative metaphors – swirly black-holes, fiery supernova damn it – unconventional idioms to show the experience of the diagnosis, anything to get away from how film has handled this before (and before, and before).

While TTOE does sometimes strike me as a tame TV film, once Jane comes into the story, the film develops a tone of intimacy. I smiled at the scenes showing the couple in bed together, still making babies, still being ‘normal’. Sex and cripples, always a topic of intense curiosity, though of course the joke is this is a non-disabled actor pretending, so the taboo factor isn’t really much to go on about.

There’s many lost opportunities which would have expanded this beyond a staid biopic. Stephen gets what many disabled people would recognise is a Personal Assistant, Jonathan, albeit in an informal capacity at first. Swallowing my ire at the casting always, I enjoyed these moments when the family frolic on the beach, Jonathan enabling Stephen to get onto the sand, and to paddle his feet – something I myself have done through assistance of a PA.

It all swims along in a gentle, genteel manner, reeling out formulaic scenes of Stephen struggling, Jane Struggling, Babies Bawling, Stephen “giving in” to a wheelchair, a power chair and so on. Just occasionally we are reminded that Stephen is a genius and has disproved his own theory about black holes – yes, he is a physicist!

I must mention the TTOE pen scenes, (and I note with glee this was picked up on in a disparaging tone in a blog on The Slate). Early on Stephen-Ed does the weak hand tremble; he drops pens but he picks them up. Near the end of the film when on stage in his wheelchair, basking in applause and feted by his peers, a pretty woman drops her pen in the audience – and in his mind Stephen-Ed throws off that crippled body and strides to her side, an abled-bodied gallant, picking up the pen – before going back to the prison of his dreadful impairment (etc etc). I did swear aloud at this trite fancy – though of course, I cannot say if Stephen (or Jane) relayed this episode to the filmmakers. The film certainly holds up disability in a sickly glow of inspiration porn; a pure able-bodied perspective of a disabled person. The reviews effuse with off-putting superlatives and clichés. “Defy… impossible odds”, “earnest and profound”, “tasteful and affecting”. And so on, ad nauseam.

I did crave to know more about the practical and pertinent details of Stephen’s social care. I admit this wasn’t within the remit of this story, of Jane’s story. But how did he get his staff (eventually) in place? From a disabled person’s perspective, I need to know these things; there can be a strong validation in seeing aspects of your life echoed in that of a famous disabled person’s. After all, it doesn’t happen every day or even every year.

And I have to bring in class, sorry. Hawking the recognised genius, is supported by a devoted wife, and colleagues, as his impairment progresses. As Stephen is supporting the film, we can only trust that this is true – but it’s a long way from the struggle with disability if you are poor, working class and not remotely privileged. There’s a nod to Stephen being a –‘liberal socialist’ – but I get the sense that he was never on the rough end of a government sponsored drive to get scrounging disabled people off benefits, and that his extraordinary brain found him the gilded life at Cambridge, allowing him to bypass many of the challenges we ordinary cripples face. I also wonder if many a Con-Dem hasn’t speculated unhelpfully that if Prof Hawking can work, why can’t the bloody lot of you lazy shirkers? There’s much irony then that this film is primarily about the world’s most famous disabled person.

Did Hawking receive the now doomed Independent Living Fund, set to close in June of this year? The Prof does support our fight to stop it closing; the redoubtable disabled activist Gabriel Pepper has letters to prove it. A shame that our fight to save ILF, which supports severely disabled people like him to live independently, cannot link into the PR around this film.

I know that I’ve raised issues outside of the remit of a gentle and middling biopic made by non-disabled people and supported by one disabled person, who dare I say, seems utterly disinterested in disability politics.

Yet this film might purport to be a story about a rather engaging couple who find themselves in a set of unexpected circumstances, but especially as Eddie won the Oscar, it’s set to be a global phenomenon. It will move across the world’s movie markets and take on its own time travel. Hawking may be a genius but he ain’t no obvious activist. I’ll leave the argument of whether he should be for another day, but regrettably this film carries tired ideals and predictable messages about the fear of impairment, which do little to give average disabled person, the not-so-genius like me, anything much to celebrate.

I’ll end by saying like the paradoxes we are told exist in physics, this film is heavy with the contradictory – when considering Stephen Hawking, at the centre of it all, is the most famous disabled person in the world, and one I speculate, who is actually quite happy with his lot.

It comes to my attention that family and some friends have a rather sweet notion that I lead a ‘glamorous’ life.

One minute I’m a sudden guest on Newsnight due to the Lord Freud debacle then, previewing Lost in Spaces at Soho Theatre, with its old insalubrious reputation bestowing a glint of the naughty, then off to The Royal Festival Hall to be naughty in Criptease – and now, look at me, the show-off. I am soon to Liverpool to the mighty DadaFest International 2014 to give my show a second airing – a fitting conclusion to nine months of intense development before the show tours in 2015.

I don’t wish to ruin their romantic notions of my life, but the reality is that for all those moments of glorious achievement, there are endless days of hard work – and the irritations of juggling different and complex impairments.

I’ll say it and be damned. Yes, there is pain too, a gnawing goblin in my bones. I hate it and always will. It gets in my way. No, I don’t think life isn’t worth living, no I don’t want to go to Dignitas, and no, I do not support the Dignity in Dying Bill.

Because, amongst many other pleasures, there are the words. Mine.

Oh, words words words words words words words words words.

Words. Into forms. Into stories. My passion. If I don’t indulge this passion I retreat into myself and dissolve into a mute weepy puddle. Excuse the self-indulgent moment.

It’s all about that; and I am alert as I can be with Bethany, my director and project manager, as we make lists for travel, ensuring a stress-limiting journey to Liverpool, booking train assistance and streamlining props. You know what? It’s exciting!

After a quick lunch it’s time to revisit the Lost in Spaces script.

I’m happy with the poems that feature in the show but want to tighten the structure. There’s a flow between the portrayal of stages in my life, coloured with music, photos and diary entries that must keep its focus. The visual must be supported with the spoken, and linking my life to the universal is key.

I do have a surprise for my Dadafest performance, a secret revealed only for the audience in Liverpool. If I tell you, I’d have to kill you, obviously.